Why a Hard Disk Is a Better Bargain Than an SSD 403
Lucas123 writes "While solid state disks may be all the rage, what's often being overlooked in the current consumer market hype is that fact that hard disk drive prices are at an all-time low — offering users good performance and massive amounts of capacity for 10 to 30 cents a gigabyte. And in a side by side comparison of overall performance of consumer SSDs and HDDs, it's hard to justify spending 10 times as much for a little more speed."
Understatement (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Understatement (Score:5, Insightful)
but burst speed measured with HDTach is the only metric that's important when you wish to make your point that traditional rotating platter based hard drives are "nearly as fast" as quality SSD drives.
seriously.....
is there anyone by now that HASN'T seen the extensive test by Anandtech that completely DESTROYS this bullshit article?
All that matters in the real world for HDD performance is Random read and write speeds.
And the difference in the two is an order of magnitude or more using the very fastest consumer drives (WDVR) and a quality SSD (Intel X-25).
Re:Understatement (Score:5, Informative)
but burst speed measured with HDTach is the only metric that's important when you wish to make your point that traditional rotating platter based hard drives are "nearly as fast" as quality SSD drives.
seriously.....
is there anyone by now that HASN'T seen the extensive test by Anandtech that completely DESTROYS this bullshit article?
All that matters in the real world for HDD performance is Random read and write speeds. And the difference in the two is an order of magnitude or more using the very fastest consumer drives (WDVR) and a quality SSD (Intel X-25).
The best part is that this isn't even an article, just a random slashdot user musing that SSD's aren't worth it and a review of two of the newest high performance disk drives.
Or maybe there is a typo and he actually wanted to link to this [computerworld.com] story?
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is there anyone by now that HASN'T seen the extensive test by Anandtech that completely DESTROYS this bullshit article?
Actually, yes, I hadn't seen the bloody article, and would have greatly benefitted from a link, you know, one of those wonders of modern technology whereby you can give a clickable fragment of text that takes a reader directly to the article you are talking about, so they don't have to scratch their heads and wonder WTF you're talking about.
Having had a quick scan of Anandtech, I guess you
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There are actually two major articles on SSDs, both amazing and completely worth reading.
Re:Understatement (Score:5, Insightful)
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Only an idiot would buy either of those products.
Or an "irrational consumer" to use the technical term.
Their price does not justify their benefit. RAID etc.
Especially in an article about "bargains".
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Understatement (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a friend who just replaced a single 72GB Raptor (not Velociraptor, but still a 10K RPM SATA HDD with 32MB of cache) with TWO (2) OCZ Vertex 30GB SSDs in RAID0 and let me tell you, the difference in performance is nothing short of staggering (and was with a single drive before he added the second). Solid state drives are the single largest upgrade you can do to any modern PC assembled from parts manufactured in the last 3 years.
If you haven't seen the difference with the new generation of SSDs (Intel X25-E/M and anything with the Indilinx or Samsung controllers - not JMICRON drives) I seriously encourage you to do yourself a favor and just try one out. You can get a 30GB Vertex for as low as ~$130. Sure, it benchmarks with TWICE the throughput of the fastest consumer HDD on the planet (WD VelociRaptor) but that doesn't really tell you the whole story. It's not just throughput, its the random read speeds and the total silence from the drive that is just absolutely awesome.
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No, he just likes his computer to be very very fast and can afford it. I have raptors in my PCs as well and I'm not a gamer either. I have two PC's, a linux box running fedora 9 with a 36GB raptor and a windows xp machine that I built later with a 72GB raptor (which I got open box from newegg for $89 a couple years back, absolutel steal at the time). My linux box has 25GB free and my windo
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The latest and greatest HDDs are indeed faster than ever before, especially with 32MB of cache, but they're still the biggest bottleneck in the equation. Sequential reads are pretty tolerable with HDD but the seek time is the killer.
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This is a very interesting article if you are considering SSDs
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Anandtech did all the hard work, and all ComputerWorld did was add hype and exaggeration. Read Anandtechs articles, and then you'll know what the SSD slowdown means, and whether it's a good idea for you to pick an SSD for your next drive.
Anandtech isn't perfect tech journalism, but it's head and shoulders above practically everything else written in English.
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Try this [anandtech.com]. Just searching for SSD will get you lots of interesting articles there.
Alchemy (Score:4, Funny)
"A little more speed" ? how a bout a lot more speed ?
No matter what I do with my Bunsen Burner and Alchemy cookbook I can still only turn my SSD's into a molten pile of useless debris. Which smells.
Tips for speed production using only harddrive technology would be most welcome.
Wrong link... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Understatement (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll go for capacity every time
Will you? Even when your primary objective is one of the following?
If you just need storage, I would agree with you. My file server uses an array of traditional 1TB HDD like everybody else, but when you have a file server with all your data, none of the other computers in your house will need significant amounts of their own capacity. Why target capacity on basically a thin client when you can get something smaller with so many better attributes?
Re:Understatement (Score:4, Insightful)
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Tell that to my friend who just lost an entire web design project because he was storing it on a two year old flash drive which died.
How long would an HDD last being carried around in a pocket for 2 years?
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but flash memory is guaranteed to die after a sufficient number of writes.
No, it's guaranteed to become read-only, and the "sufficient number of writes" is up into the 100k range, which would mean writing over the entire disk every day for a few hundred years.
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Generally speaking, consumers don't benefit from the extra speed that SSD offers.
Sure there are some serious specialty applications that depend on high
volume low latency IO. These are not things that your consumer user is
typically doing though.
Usually, USB or network attached storage is quite sufficient.
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Sure there are some serious specialty applications that depend on high volume low latency IO.
Like an operating system boot. Yeah, nobody does that. Mark my words, anybody will notice the performance difference on a decent SSD, regardless of what they do.
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Will you? Even when your primary objective is one of the following?
I won't speak for the GP, but personally, my primary objective is always storage. So yes, I really will choose storage capacity every time.
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Think long term.
The 256GB SSD drive of today matches the processor speed and feature set of a machine that will be a castoff in maybe three years. It's my observation that people almost never take a drive from an old machine to a new machine in notebooks.
Therefore if you liked SSD for whatever reasons, do it if the reasons are of value to you. If you need the terabyte, do it-- and be happy.
Thin is in. The vast majority of users probably don't do video or audio for a living, and only have what they consume a
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Thinking long-term, how reliable are SSD's?
The average lifespan of a hard drive is (guesstimate) five years? An SSD is going to be much shorter.
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In fact, now that I think of it, there's no reason to think that the two couldn't be combined with some sort of smart interface to let the drive itself decide w
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the controller card to run this (assuming you're not going to try to get your software raid to run this) would be more than the drives..........
if you are trying to get your software raid to run this, you'd better get a really nice processor.......
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This is what just happened.
gorta:
I like oranges better than apples, so it's better for me to eat an orange.
tepples:
You are wrong, gorta. Some people like apples better than oranges.
And as for you sig, when was the last time you lost "the cloud" or "the cloud" broke?
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Someone who shoots photos or videos on the road might use a laptop for storing and editing them.
Firstly, let's be a little more specific. Shooting photos on the road is not exactly a space intensive task for most people. At 2 megabytes a jpeg for your average ultra-portable, you'd have to try pretty hard to fill up 16 gigabytes. On the other hand, if you're the guy shooting in raw making 60 megapixel landscapes, a laptop probably isn't the best tool for the job anyway. Photos aside, I'll grant your point with video which does tend to be very space intensive.
Secondly, somebody who needs that kind
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I don't shoot landscapes much but do shoot 40MP raw a lot. I tend to leave the images on the CF cards, since I have to carry them for the back anyway and their capacity has increased to the point where that is preferable to lugging any other storage. They hold up better to being banged around as well.
I am always suprised that on a site where there should be a higher than normal concentration of 'above average' computer users, there is always a lot of butthurt over some new (and usually expensive) piece of h
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Hard drives are fast enough for me, and a small SSD drive would take up a SATA socket that could otherwise be used for another hard drive.
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If I were building myself a new system today I would opt for a smaller high performance SSD for my system partition and scratch / swap partition, and a lower performance high capacity conventional HDD for backups, music, movies, etc.
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Why not a 1.5TB for your data and 256GB for your OS and applications?
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Given the choice between a 256GB SSD and a 1.5TB HD, I'll go for capacity every time...
My small-but-heavily-accessed 30GB database has other priorities.
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It depends upon the task. If you're doing software development: Linus Torvalds has said repeatedly that he really appreciates his new development system from Intel, and it is the E-class Intel SSD that really makes a difference for his system reponsiveness and compile times.
But if you're doing large-transaction I/O (my environmental modeling does lots of transactions for a 9000-cell-by-6000-cell modeling grid, at 200MB per transaction, you also want a large striped disk array.
FWIW
Re:Understatement (Score:5, Insightful)
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/mythvg-mythtv 658G 645G 14G 98%
Or: Pick the right tool for your job.
Re:Understatement (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, some people are becoming garbage collectors though. Lots of content they never watch, that just sits around on disk spinning around in circles.
Re:Understatement (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Understatement (Score:5, Insightful)
However, if you only write to it once (i.e. long-term storage) flash storage will never degrade.
Well, we're talking long enough for the metal itself to deteriorate via weathering and such, at which point you'll be dead and gone!
Every time a spinning disk is plugged in, there is a small chance it will fail just in the act of spinning up. It's tiny sure, but it's there for spinning disks and not for SSDs.
Honestly, the flash drive is capable of so many writes (it's in the thousands, and the drives write every bit on the disk before it will go back and re-write) that they likely outlast conventional drives in all but the most write-heavy applications.
Plus, when a flash drive fails, the failure does not prevent reads, only writes. Recovery would be as simple as plugging it in and pulling your data off. With conventional disks, a physical failure -often- results in unrecoverable data. The reason data recovery services cost thousands of dollars is because it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to recover the data in many cases. Trust me, I know a number of people who have gotten backup religion only after spending thousands of dollars to fail to recover a critical piece of data (one was a single file needed for a massive audit - all was recovered except that file). The ability to read even after a failure makes SSDs -significantly- safer for data storage.
Lastly, the speed boost is HUGE. Go check the read/write numbers for SSDs vs the top end consumer drives. The worst SSDs on the market only do a little better than the best conventional drives, the benchmark I saw put various SSDs against a top of the line WD Raptor - 12k rpm I think. Due to a poor controler design, the lower end drives only performed a little better. The high end drives made the Raptor look like a complete joke. Even with the performance flaw another slashdot article mentioned (drives aren't as fast after they have been filled up, it is fixable on most drives) the top SSDs were still -significantly- faster than the Raptor. I think the prices were even similar for the same capacity, but I could be remembering funny on that one. You definitely don't get 12krpm out of a 1tb hard drive though, they are still in the 300gb range for the consumer market if I remember right.
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However, if you only write to it once (i.e. long-term storage) flash storage will never degrade.
The technology is too new to say this for sure. I know that a shellac record lasts at least 94 years for example, because I have one such record. There is no way to know how long flash will last and the accelerated aging tests are unreliable, after all, they showed that a CD-R could hold its data for 50-100 years and we now know that is not true.
Hard drives also are not meant for long term storage. I try to store my data on removable media (like magnetic tape) so that if the reader device fails, at least my
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I don't even need 256GB, so I'd prefer the 256GB SSD. Thanks.
In a dirt-cheap subnotebook PC, which needs to run as long as possible on its battery, what would you choose between an 8 GB SSD and a 120 GB HD?
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Might be possible. My current notebook has 256G which is getting tight the two before that came in at 50G which got tight near the end of the 2nd one's life. The one before that had 4G. 4G was very tight and that was Windows 2000 or Linux a decade ago.
Other than the OS, the main problem is you want 2-3x ram for virtual memory and I can't see being under 2 gigs of ram. Also mail is now frequently in the megabytes.
On the other hand on my blackberry I have a 4g memory card and I never use it. The 64 megs
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Hibernate dumps ram to disk and shuts the machine off.
Suspend (or sleep) simply supplies minimal power to everything - the most agressive basically kills everything except a very small amount of power to keep the contents of RAM from disappearing. Less agressive sleep states can leave your NIC available and hard disk writable, but they consume a lot more power than an agressive sleep state.
From what some have said about SSDs, hibernate should come up only a few seconds slower than suspend. Pretty cool, mi
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This fantastic and voluminous illustrates how even the slowest SSD drives run circles around the fastest HDDs. However, current SSD technology causes those drives to run much more slowly when all the sectors have been written to at some point in time, and remain slow until the drive is formatted. SSD is consistently faster than HDD out of the gate, but until SSD algorithms or mechanics/chemistry are improved they lose their edge after a few months of regular use. [anandtech.com]
"hard disk drive prices are at an all-time low" (Score:5, Insightful)
Aren't hard disk prices always at an all time low? Have they ever gone up in price?
Re:"hard disk drive prices are at an all-time low" (Score:4, Interesting)
If you have ever owned one (Score:5, Interesting)
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fast enough
Is that like having too much memory, big enough hard disk? No such thing as fast enough.
forre.st storage calculator (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:forre.st storage calculator (Score:5, Informative)
I like this one better: http://diskcompare.com/ [diskcompare.com]
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Thanks, that's fantastic! I didn't realize that a 2TB drive was now available. The prices for 1TB and 1.5TB have really dropped, though it looks like the low priced 1.5TB drive has some issues.
I purchased a 1TB drive on 10/8/2007 for $329.99. A 1TB drive now costs $74.99. Ouch! That's not even two years.
On the plus side, in another 1.5 years the price for a 2TB drive should have dropped from $239.00 to under $100. I think that's when I'll be upgrading.
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pointless analysis: -1! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Maybe they meant "jaw-dropping slow"? Even for a rotary drive, that doesn't strike me as terribly impressive.
As far as latency vs. throughput, which is more important varies by your usage.
With RAID setups, you'll want lower latency drives, as throughput can be increased with more drives.
For you OS/application disks, you'll want lower latency, since you are usually dealing with smaller data files.
For "pure data" disks, throughput may be better, unless you have a lot of simultaneous reads/writes, in which cas
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That would have the same problem as the solid state - expensive and small size. The HDD I just ordered for my notebook (supposedly) has a 5.5ms seek time.
I wish this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820609415 [newegg.com] was about 1/5th the price so I could seriously consider it. Still, it's already down from the ~$2100 I first saw it for. I think I'll just hold my breath...
^H^H^H^H^H^H NO CARRIER: FATAL USER ERROR
Doesn't die.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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you are looking at some pretty expensive data recovery plans to get data off of it.
When you find a data recovery company that can recover data from shattered glass platters, let me know.
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It depends - I put some of my laptops through a lot of abuse. The Western Digital and Toshiba drives took some good falls in the notebook (running or not running), and survived without an issue. The Seagates and Fujitsus tended to die if I bumped the thing wrong (well, not quite that bad, but they did die with some fairly small mechanical shock compared to what the WDs and Toshibas survived).
Yes, a flash drive is more sturdy than any of those, but that is only important if the others are not sufficiently st
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Define "bargain" (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think anyone out there is saying that from a $/GB perspective that SSD's are a bargain.
But here are two key points:
1) Not everyone needs 1TB of storage (about $100, and practically entry level now for hard drives). Especially on laptops, a $350 32GB SSD (also entry level) can get you quite far, especially if it is reserved for the OS and applications. You can pick up a 32GB SSD for a reasonable price, and get the really good performance, and use a big, cheap HD for media files.
2) Many people view the extra performance + lower power consumption + greater reliability as worth the premium price, and that makes them a value. Just because they can't compete on a $/GB basis doesn't make them a bargain to some people.
Re:Define "bargain" (Score:5, Insightful)
If you quote the cost/gig of magnetic storage based on the price of a basic OEM drive in whatever the sweet spot happens to be at the time, it looks like an incredible deal. 10 cents/gig seems to be the going number these days. However, that is for a 1TB+ drive. What if you only need 4GB, or 1GB, or 16MB? You can get a 1TB drive for $100; but you can't get a 1GB drive for 10 cents, or even $10. Traditional hard drives have comparatively high fixed costs("fixed" in the "these costs are more or less the same between the lowest capacity and the highest capacity" not in the strict economic sense). The cheapest HDD you can get(new, quantity one, not off the back of Honest Yuri's truck) is $25-$30, no matter how small a drive you want. For roughly the same price, you can get an 8GB flash drive under the same conditions.
For any application at or under 8GB(a number that is way higher than it used to be, and will probably keep rising) flash is actually cheaper than HDD, because of HDD's high fixed costs. Not to mention all the applications where a full hard drive is undesirable for other reasons. This certainly doesn't include file servers(unless IOPs are a big consideration) and it doesn't yet cover most desktop/laptop scenarios(though it is much closer than it used to be, and it does cover a fair few netbooks); but it does include the overwhelming majority of PMP, appliance, and embedded applications.
It's not just about speed, is it ? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's also about dropability. And moving parts. And use of Coulomb. And heat.
2.5" or 3.5" ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks like the submitter is mixing up 2.5" HDD and 3.5" HDD.
SSD is all the rage in the 2.5" segment, not the 3.5" (yet, as they are much much faster than what's described in the article and much more expensive as well).
I can't fit these very fast 3.5" HDD in my Macbook Pro no matter hard I try.
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I can't fit these very fast 3.5" HDD in my Macbook Pro no matter hard I try.
Then you are not using the right tool for the job, try using a hammer.
Am I naive in now hoping that we won't see that Anonymous Coward fella posting links to goatse and random rantings 24/7 for a while?
Wrong article linked (Score:5, Informative)
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Geez, do the "editors" do anything here?
I find it amusing how many people wrote and commented before you pointed this out. Why even bother having articles? All we need are paragraph-sized opinions posted and then people can argue. Administration of the site could be entirely automated. Then again, given how little the "editors" do, perhaps it already is...
This article is nearly 80 computer years old (Score:5, Informative)
July 2008 (Score:2, Interesting)
A side by side comparison? (Score:2)
Could someone please point out the SSD they compare to in the article?
I don't know why... (Score:2)
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Performance has always had its premium. (Score:5, Interesting)
Higher performing parts have always carried a higher price. However, there is a need for higher performance, and clearly the market shows that the demand is there for the price, I'm looking at you servers and computer enthusiasts.
I have a 300GB velociraptor in my computer, and I have been eye'ing the SSD's for some time, but they just haven't hit the price point for me yet to justify purchasing them yet.
In fact, I feel like an oddity, I work for a small IT firm, and when I asked my boss why a customer's computer had a raid0 of 250'sGB (where we had to replace them both with a new 500GB) why did he just get a velociraptor in the first place, he simply stated that it was cheaper to get 2 250GB hard drives at $60 than it was to get 1 300GB velociraptor.
Now, the only thing that may change the landscape from all this is that SSDs are built on silicon, which is subject to Moore's Law, and we've witnessed how cheap thumb drives and other flash media drives are, there's definitely a real possibility that in time SSD's will be faster AND cheaper than HDDs.
Wrong article link (Score:5, Informative)
That said, I don't think anyone claims SSD is better than HDD if your bottleneck is capacity or sequential read speed. However if you do lots of random reads/writes, this line from the comparison says it all:
OCZ's drive had a random access time of
That's an 84X difference.
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I don't expect enterprise data centers to be using SSD to host my flikr photos any time soon (outside of a few specialized workloads such as database write cache [sun.com]), but the laptop and the solid state disk are a match made in heaven.
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Then the actual article says the opposite of what the submitter is trying to get us to believe: "if you're downloading video and using multiple applications at the same time, an SSD will give you a very noticeable performance boost"
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Basically, you don't have to defrag an SSD. Traditional file allocation schemes assume that sequential access is better, so defrag software tries to order files to land on sequential positions. But in an SSD, there's no need for that.
I agree (Score:2, Informative)
I have used a 30GB OCZ for some time now, with one system partition and one for data. I recebtly moved the system part (Windows XP) back to an older 250GB Hitachi drive, with no perceptible speed loss. The data partition holds World of Warcraft and does give a moderate speed gain on startup. It also reduces delay when switching between two WoW instances significantly. But that is about it.
I think the primary strengths of SSD are still high shock tolerance and low power needs, which makes them ideal for lapt
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You won't see any speed increase on your home system as your file system attempts to be contiguous, which is what disk defragmentation does. You read a file, that file is in sequence on the drive, the spinning platter model works for this. If you tried the same thing
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The write speed is poor (I agree with you there), but that is not the fault of SSDs in general. The problem is that you and I are both cheap and spent only things that HDD have on SSDs is capacity and price.
That's not quite an honest statement. (Score:4, Insightful)
Moving parts (Score:4, Interesting)
Read distance measured in microns, magnets, heads, cylinders, normal forces, weight and my favorite, impact functions - all of these seem like great reasons to move to SSD.
1000 (or more) rewrites is a scary limit for the SSD route, but I like the idea of walking around with my laptop on and not worrying about drive failures (as much).
Take this for what it's worth, but I was at a conference a couple years ago and the VP of Intel's desktop support division said that 30% of his problems with laptops were solved by requiring folks to wait for the drive to spin down after hibernating/shutdown operations and before shouldering the laptop. Even if the number seems somewhat inflated, it seems like good advice for anyone with a "conventional" hard drive.
Performance and storage are not the only metrics (Score:2)
This is how you justify the ten-fold increase in price.
when we looked at netbooks... (Score:2)
It was a 120GB HDD or 8GB SSD for the same price. We chose the HDD's and it took about a whole 2 seconds to come to that decision. SSD's might be all the rage in the geeky circles, but 120GB vs. 8GB. The extra performance was not worth it to us over the extra storage.
How can you say that with a straight face? (Score:2)
Really? People don't know that hard disks offer a capacity/$ value that would shock your grandpa, and that the deal just keeps getting better? I don't believe you. Find me just one of these people. I bet you can't.
You don't buy SSDs for a bargain.. (Score:2)
You don't buy SSDs for a bargain..
You buy them because it is the one modification you can make in this day and age that will have a dramatic impact on the speed of your computing experience.
Adding more RAM, stepping up to a faster processor with twice as many cores - yeah, you'll notice those things a bit (especiaslly when multitasking) but if you want to do something that may cust your start up time to a third of what it was, and make it seems like you've turbochraged your machine, for most people an SSD w
Article Misses The Mark (Score:5, Insightful)
Next I transferred a 1GB folder filled with photos and video files to the drives from a USB drive. Both the SSD and the HDD accomplished the file transfer in about 50 seconds (the Seagate was 2 seconds slower).
Hmm, interesting that they both performed exactly the same. I would have expected the HDD to be faster transfering sequential data, except they were probably both limited by the transfer rate of the older, generic USB drive you were using. Way to go, you've successfully benchmarked the transfer rate for a USB drive that you weren't even reviewing.
Or this:
A lot depends on how you expect to use your computer. If you're a college student writing papers and surfing the Internet for information, the advantages of an SSD are negligible, but if you're downloading video and using multiple applications at the same time, an SSD will give you a very noticeable performance boost, Wong said.
This is exactly backwards. The college student downloading video will need the extra hard drive space, where the college student writing papers and surfing the internet is going to have a much better experience with storage that performs better under random io workloads. But then again, what college student these days doesn't have an external usb hard drive for all their media?
They also mention that consumers will likely look for larger storage regardless of the type of underlying technology. But the consumers likely to care are the same as those likely to know the difference between HDD and SDD in the first place. The consumer that doesn't is more likely to make a purchase based on "wow 20 second bootup" and "MS Office starts in a snap, and everything goes faster" than anything else.
For interactive workloads nothing beats SSD.
uh huh (Score:2)
When I can stick a USB magnetic platter drive that is smaller than my thumb in my pocket and not worry about it breaking into pieces or when I can insert and remove them into my camera/phone, then you can say that traditional drives have caught up with SSD. And as the world goes netbook, netbooks have a lot to gain from compact, robust, low-power, silent storage.
Why not RAID? (Score:2)
have four magnetic drives running on software RAID 10 -- not the 1+0 variety. I get 3x a single drive's read (200MB/s) and about 1.5-2X write. Plus I have a full backup and 2TB of space. The sw kernel module uses less than 5-10% of one cpu on a quad system
At this time, why not buy ma
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I remember an article like this (Score:5, Insightful)
Somehow I expect this article to have a similarly short shelf life and will look at best amusingly quaint in about 2-3 years when SSDs start getting really price competitive with spinning platters. Probably not cheaper, but close enough that people will be willing to pay the extra for the rather substantial performance improvement.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd rather have a 1TB hard drive then a 32GB SSD. I play lots of games, watch videos and listen to music. A 32GB SSD just won't fly.
Let me put it this way, would you rather have 4GB of DDR2 ram or 512MB of DDR3 ram?
If you care about random read/write performance, which is the bottleneck for almost all disk access tasks, it's actually more like 4 GB of DDR2 ram vs 512 MB of L2 cache if you consider the ~100x speed difference between SSDs and HDs. That becomes a more compelling choice.